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Monday, January 24, 2011

THE ISLAND OF NOTHING TO SPEAK OF

I fell overboard and was swept away, frantically flailing about in the vicious whirling, cold dark wetness of words, gasping, as I took in a mouthful of salty verbs and spit them out. Walk, run, jump, fall, twist, turn, thrash, and screw, all went flying. I clung to a large noun floating by with parasitic adjectives sucking on its fat belly. No end in sight. I caught a couple of strange and foreign words and devoured them without thought of what they meant. I caught a few truths that tasted bitter, and often nauseating and tough to chew, and later my stomach churned and I threw up. The seaweed of ennui seemed to wrap itself around me. I tried to chew myself free, shredded my boredom with my teeth, and swallowed it. It was plentiful and tasteless, but went down easy. Yet, there was a vague fear that it was eating me, as I was eating it. My actions became an endless list of flowery, saccharine, and slimy adverbs. Monotonously, wearily, resignedly, fruitlessly, I sank into stuttering half-sentences. My whole life blinked, glittered, flashed, flowed and carved arroyos into canyons, and ran down the gutter of my brain into some rain barrel at the base of my spine. I crawled along the mucky bottom, clawing at the mushy decaying bed of lost expressions, meaningless contradictions, lies, nonsense syllables, idle chatter, and things never said. At long last, I stumbled onto the shore of silence and sat there lost for words for quite some time. And then I began to write.

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